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«Как вы яхту назовете, так она и поплывет»? Роль вербальных компонентов мышления в актуализации образной структуры абстрактных и конкретных понятий
The article is focused on one of the central issues of psychology of thinking and reasoning –the mechanism of verbal-imagery conversion underlying the distinction between essential and non-es-sential features of objects. It alsodescribes the role of verbalisation in unfolding of mental images of concrete and abstract concepts. The following hypotheses were experimentally tested: 1) quality of verbal definition of a concept correlates positively with the quality of its mental image; 2) prior formulation ofverbal definition of a concept improves the quality of its mental image; 3) numbers of essential features included into both verbal and imagery representations differ between concrete and abstract concepts; 4) numbers of essential features included into representations of both concrete and abstract concepts depend on the type of preceding mental activity (verbalisation or depicting); 5) numbers of essential features included into both pictorial and verbal representations correlate with psychometric intelligence.The study comprised61 participants(42 females, mean age =20 years)assigned to one of the four groups (three experimental and one controlcondition) differingin types and numbers of experimental tasks. Participants were administered J. Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Test (which we used to control the level of psychometric intelligence) and either standard or modified version of “Picto-grams” test. The results showed that quality of imagery representations of concepts correlated positively with the quality of their verbal definitions; however, none of these variables was related to psychometric in-telligence. Even though the second hypothesis of thestudy was not confirmed, verbalisation was found to lead to representation of a larger number of essential features of concepts compared to de-picting. In addition, mental representations of abstract concepts appeared to include more essential features than those of concrete concepts. We interpret these findings as the evidence for integral mechanism of conceptual processing that contributes to the coordination of verbal and imagery pro-cesses. They might also highlight the lack of imagery skills in young adults due to ‘total visualisation’ of everyday cognitive and educational practices.